by Ursula Bloom
‘It must have been very dreadful for him,’ she said, half to herself.
‘Yes, of course, but maybe he has learnt to push the past into the past and turn the key on it. Life’s big lesson is Turn the key on it.’
She wondered if it were quite so easy to turn the key on memories, which are for ever recurring.
‘She never came here?’ she asked.
‘How curious you girls always are! Once, I think, but Madame knows all about it, for there is nothing in life that she misses. Beware of her. She can be a proper old harridan, and you have been warned!’
‘I rather guessed that.’
‘We were talking of Bernard’s wife. She was a Spanish miss, a girl from the wild country in the Andalusian mountains beyond La Linea, so I believe. The one mercy is that it was plainly a physical love, and that never leaves such deep scars as the other kind can do.’
They began to walk up the crooked street, when he found that he had run out of cigarettes. He went across to a small tabac, and came back with a packet of Petit Caporal cigarettes. They crossed a bit of wild land with weeds valiantly growing on it, and above it a mimosa in abundant blossom, smelling heavenly. They were now in the artists’ quarter itself, walking on a cobbled street with a palm tree here and there, or a Judas tree preparing to bloom in the dark red of his blood.
‘What a strange tree it is!’ she said.
‘You know the story?’
‘Of course not, I never saw them until I came out here, only that they are called Judas trees.’
‘It was originally a tree with snow-white blossom, and was the one from which it is said that Judas hanged himself. Next day the blossom on that tree was dyed the colour of his blood, and all Judas trees carry this colour for ever.’
She stared at him, fascinated by the story. ‘I love old superstitions and such.’
‘This is no superstition, I can tell you, it is very much sound fact, for the tree is red with his blood.’
‘Indeed yes.’
They walked along so narrow a path that it had to be single file. One could have turned a corner on to the beach, and the sea was closer than she had thought. Nobody had curtains or blinds, and looking in one saw artists, both men and women, standing before their easels, here and there a sculptor, but she noticed that they were in the minority. The whole colony had that atmosphere of warm friendliness which she so enjoyed.
‘Bernard lives there,’ Greville told her, pointing to a big rather clumsy-looking house, painted a light coral shade and with a radiant plumbago climbing up it.
‘It looks lovely,’ she said.
Already the colony intrigued her, for it was like visiting a homeland. It had the peacefulness of complete calm, a thing she envied, for she knew that ever since the visit to Devonshire, calm had deserted her.
‘It’s charming here,’ she said.
‘Yes, it is rather nice,’ and then, ‘Look! That’s Bernie!’
She could see the big, rather stout man in the faded blue smock, standing in the front room working on a piece of statuary, lumbering, and half formed. Staring at it, some of it so beautifully shaped, the rest so awkward, she felt quite suddenly that the sense of shadow which had been with her all her life, had gone. It was no longer merely a grey nothingness, something she could not describe, nor could understand, it was taking formation in some strange manner. I ‒ I don’t follow what is happening, she thought, and her heart missed a beat.
He was a big man, larger than she would have anticipated, for he was all six-foot-two, with the arms of a smith, yet his hands were eager, and his movements quick. His head was bare, and covered with thick darkly auburn hair which had a tendency to curl, as so frequently happens with that particular type of hair. He wore no collar, but round his throat was a gay scarf, a splotch of vigorous colour in contrast to the faded smock, with a great tear on one side of it. Obviously he used it as a duster if he wished.
She went closer, fascinated by the picture which he presented, and he turned to look at her. It was then that she saw that he had hazel eyes, light brown, with flecks of red here and there, laughing eyes, and understanding too.
He saw her looking and said to her, ‘Come inside, whoever you are,’ with a slight tone of irritation. ‘You worry me standing there gaping at me. Just come inside and have a look around.’
‘I’m sorry. I did not mean to worry you.’
She stepped through the french window into the room. It was unlike any other she had ever seen. She knew then that the house itself was almost nothing, it was the work which was done here which counted. Bernard Dante did not care about his surroundings, they were merely the backcloth to himself. Through the half-open door beyond them, Diana could see a young woman working in what was obviously the kitchen. She was plainly French, with lustrous dark hair piled high, the usual black dress and an apron pinned over it. There was nothing that was picturesque or gracious about her, and somehow one could not associate this house with the general destiny of houses in which people lived. It was too messy, too uninspired, just a hut, she thought, but the man himself was inspiring. Greville had gone off to the delicatessen, where he explained that he had to have a row. It might take some time. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she said.
Now she watched Bernie as he scarcely noticed her, and went on chipping at the arm of the statue before him. For the moment it held all his interest and all his enthusiasm, then having apparently done what he had set himself to do, he turned round and looked at her.
‘How do you do it?’ she asked.
He seemed surprised at the question. ‘I just do it, you see, and I want to do it. It is inspiring to create from nothing.’ Then he turned again to the statue, and chipped at a small piece of work which had caught his attention as needing remodelling. The twang of the instrument sounded like ‘rough music’ in a country village.
‘You conceive it first?’ she asked.
‘Of course. It is like the babe formed from thought and desire, but it has to have birth.’
‘I see.’
She remembered lying in the nursing home in Newbury, riding through intangible space, not sure what was happening, or even if she was herself. She remembered the longing to take the strange shadows and twist them into reality, into living, and so create them. Now she saw this man doing it. He gave fact to his dreams, and they could have been the dreams of despair.
He almost ignored her presence, and she watched his attention to detail, the way he studied the arm which he was now altering, screwing up his eyes, thinking keenly (for he was one of those men whom you could see think), then starting again.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said at last.
‘Is it now? I happened never to want to work in colour, I thought the forming of a personality meant more. With my own hands shaping nothing into something forceful and strong. This is sculpture, and stone is my medium.’
‘I like it,’ she answered. ‘It arrests me.’
He turned to look at her almost as though her voice had attracted his attention. ‘If you feel that, try it yourself?’
‘Oh no, I’d be useless,’ and she said it sadly, for this was impossible to explain.
‘I could help you a little. Why did you come here?’
‘I just came. And Dr James in London spoke of you.’
He was flattered. ‘Christian James?’
‘Yes.’
He turned again and did not look at her, but methodically went on chipping, and somehow the sound of the tool was a rare music to her. She saw that he gave everything of himself to the work, and realised that it was a dream coming true. She sat carefully watching; later she was surprised that she had been there such a time, and now beyond the door lay a stretch of sand, with a trail of vividly green weed here and there, then the sea. Life beyond the door had changed. Maybe life for herself had changed in this studio.
Nobody would ever know what enchantment the experience was giving her. From the window the heavenly view, and here in the studio th
e man who was very much older than she was, a man of experience, but who gave generously of himself into sheer stone. Possibly the picture was intensified by the fact that the south of France was so gay. It had a delicious if effervescent personality, and when one came here one drifted into that personality, becoming part of it. It was ever young, ever glad, but perhaps oneself had to be young to appreciate it.
Here, she thought, it is an eternal springtime of its own, something which I have never known in another world.
Perhaps it was because this was her first trip abroad, perhaps because she was so ready to be happy, conscious of the deep loneliness life had put into her heart. The early life, the memory of Devon and John, which had added to her loneliness. The memory of Newbury, and she knew that she did not want to go back there, but would have to go.
‘It looks fine,’ she told him.
The piece on which Bernard was working became more vigorous, and more alive, with every movement he made. He paused and stood back, stained with dirt and smoke, he was plainly a keen smoker.
In a strained voice she spoke again. ‘I think it is quite wonderful,’ and knew somehow that the words expressed nothing of what she really felt. His genius was terrific; in her own life so far statues had been just statues, but here in the studio this man forced them to become alive and inspiring.
‘There’s nothing new in the way I work,’ he said, ‘all of us have to do it entirely ourselves, just work on it, and then the answer comes.’
‘It’s a miracle to me.’
‘They say the world is full of miracles.’ He lumbered across to the model’s dais and sat down on the edge of it, lighting a sour old pipe. It had a horrible stench, almost two smells in one, like a chord made of more than the single notes, all of them blurring together.
He started to talk. Instinctively she felt that he liked her, just as she knew that she liked him. He was stupendously safe, she told herself.
He told her of his life; he had been an adopted son. He had always supposed that his real mother had been a light-of-love, but never knew. ‘It makes a change; it has never concerned me too much, it is the way life happens,’ was what he said.
Possibly the nice people of this world would have spoken of her as being ‘an unfortunate’; he had never thought of her this way. None of it signified to him.
Educated in small schools, he had at nine years old been adopted by a middle-aged woman who was wealthy. She was an authoress and wrote books of the popular kind, which meant that her royalties were extremely comforting to her.
He talked kindly of her. Her great anguish had been that she could never write the book which she spoke of as being ‘worth reading’. Her light style had, however, fascinated hundreds and thousands of people, yet she always suffered the extreme disappointment that she could never write the one book which she longed to compose. A Pickwick Papers, or The Forsyte Saga.
He explained. ‘I suppose I was a rather clumsy little chap. I’ve always been the plump kind, and she had a passion for red hair, mine was a bit redder then. I was known as “Copper Top”.’
She had been very good to him, and brought him up on the east side of England, in Norfolk, which he adored.
‘But damned cold,’ he admitted, ‘nothing between us and the North Pole, not too cheering.’
He was in the teens when she had come down to the Riviera to write, and what she called ‘getting copy’. As far as he could see, she had never used in any of her books a single scrap of the copy she had got, but both of them had enjoyed the warmth and the atmosphere, and perhaps he fitted it all into one brief summary: ‘It is a good place in which to forget.’
He had painted a little, but was no good at it, and this had annoyed his foster mother. She had moments of fury over his affairs with the girls of the neighbourhood. He was a provocative lover who, he told her, never missed chances when they came his way.
He said, ‘I was a love-child, and maybe all love-children think slightly different from those born in wedlock.’
When the pipe went out, he paused to fill it again, spilling much of the tobacco, and she saw that his thumb was stained a dark yellow from previous contacts of a similar nature.
He said that inspiration was easier here, she argued that the place was too gay, too eager, and it stirred up all the very youthful emotions rather than the creative ones. He said that he had married, and was widowed, glossing over it with the abruptness of drawing down a curtain on a scene which still had the capacity to hurt. In the war he could not fight, for he had had a bone disease as a child, and his hip could give him trouble. He mentioned it in a harder tone of voice, and the girl knew that he would have wished to serve; it is perhaps the desire born in the hearts of most men, to whom war is a gallant dream.
His mother had been here when the war came, and had stayed on; he had gone home. When it ended and her letters had completely ceased, he had come down here hoping to follow what had happened. He realised that she had been a marked woman, for the Huns disliked anyone who wrote. He gathered that she had died in the 1943 winter, he was afraid of the details of her death, for privately he had the idea that something horrible had taken place.
‘One suffers for one’s impressions,’ he said.
‘I know. I get them, too. But I always try to push them aside and out of my life, for there is only one end to it, and it could be the firing squad.’
He paused a moment, then he said that he could not help feeling that England would never recover from that second war, and France could be kinder; anyway it still had maintained that spontaneous gaiety of its own, something which England nowadays seemed to have lost.
He asked about her parents, and she gave him a quick picture; she thought that he understood what she meant, anyway he made no attempt to force anything.
He said, ‘Even if my mother has gone, and she has gone, she was the one who turned me to sculpture. Every time I start, I know there is the opportunity to make a dream come true, and it rests with my two hands. I half feel that she stands behind me, directs me, and shows me what to do.’
So he had shadows, also, she thought.
A clock struck the hour, an hour later than she had thought, and she got up quickly.
‘I must go home, or Greville will think that I am lost.’
‘He is the latest boy friend, of course?’
She shook her head. ‘Not really. I came down to recover from a car accident in England. Greville is staying at the hotel and he spoke to me. I wanted to see the studios and he brought me along here.’ She walked over towards the open door.
‘And your name? At least you will give me your name?’ he asked her.
‘It’s Diana Richardson.’
He paused, then made the comment which somehow she felt she could have expected of him.
‘And Diana was a huntress.’
‘I was born under the hunter’s moon, that was why they christened me Diana, not because she was a huntress, or I trust not.’
He nodded. He said, ‘When life is difficult, or you are bored stiff, come along here and see me? I’m always here, and we have much in common. I’d like to see you again.’
‘I’ll come back, I promise,’ she said.
Chapter Ten
HOLIDAY
Diana made a few enquiries at the hotel when she had a spare moment. Suzette knew nothing. Madame kept her too busily occupied for scandals, there was much to do, and less time to do it in, she explained. Then Diana asked Madame.
It was in one of her idle moments, and Madame was poised over the reception desk, her black hair piled high, never a curl out of place, and the ample bosom skilfully arranged before her. The thought of where a woman like Madame bought a bra made the girl want to laugh. It was absurd.
Oh yes, she knew M’sieur. Naturally she would know M’sieur, he was a very clever man.
He won gold medals, she explained, and then pursed her lips. What was the good of gold today? All that sort of thing had gone with the war. Les Boches! W
hat she would have liked to do with them! And a graphic flash of inspiration came across her face. The Boches had been responsible for everything that had happened, and what a detestable people they were indeed! Given a chance, she would now plunge herself into some revealing adventures of the war (when she was a Joan of Arc herself, and had rescued and saved), and what she had done to the gentlemen who deceived her. And (she wagged a finger over the reception desk) one of these days they would do it again. Have a care, for they would come, and then … mon Dieu!
Next time it would be the atom bomb, and the grand finale. She cooled down, having got over her little outburst, and then fired off into another topic.
‘But naturellement, m’lle, M. Dante is not like we are. Nevaire!’
‘Not like we are?’
Madame lowered her voice, then in a hoarse whisper she said the awful word.
‘It is true. I know it is truth. M’sieur is a bastard!’
‘Really!’ Diana felt that if she said anything more she would burst out laughing, and one must treat the matter with dignity. Madame was profound about it, and aloof. Madame disapproved, though if one made a guess at it, Madame had had children of that nature herself. She could so easily have done so.
‘Irregular,’ she said, and tapped the fat finger against her nose. ‘His mother was pewtiful, they tell me, his papa a visitor. Ah well! Our visitors visit this part of the world to amuse themselves. What does one expect? Then he was adopted.’
She explained that he had studied in Munich and Leipzig, for which quite naturally she despised him. There had been two horrible wars, mon Dieu, the terror of them! Paris had been invaded and violated, then Monsieur goes off to Germany for learning! He had had a Spanish wife. Was there nothing that the fat old woman did not know? She had died in an accident, driving herself at the time.
‘Ridicule!’ said Madame to herself, apropos of nothing.
For a while Bernard had not come to the Riviera again, but when he did return he was rich. He was also very fat. Madame should have been the last person to mention this, Diana told herself. He had riches, one of his statues was in Hyde Park, London, another commissioned by the American Embassy. ’Undreds of pounds, t’ousands of pounds, she was almost inarticulate with wonder. He was working on a statue for Copenhagen, she understood, and that would be t’ousands and t’ousands more.
